Barcelona face uncertain times as club navigates Camp Nou rebuild and financial crisis

Sunderland, in England’s second tier, boasted a bigger crowd for their league game against Rotherham United this weekend than Barcelona attracted for their opening home match.

There were 10,000 empty seats for the Spanish champions’ game against Cadiz, Barcelona’s first league match to be played at their temporary home, the Olympic Stadium, which seats almost 50,000. Only 39,603 attended the game.

Xavi Hernandez’s side will play there for at least 18 months as Camp Nou is rebuilt and expanded to a 105,000 capacity, making it the biggest football-specific stadium on the planet. Work is well under way and when The National visited on Friday, the entire top tier had been dismantled.

Barca had little choice but to leave. Real Madrid benefitted from the Covid-19 lockdown and being able to redevelop the Bernabeu into what will probably be the best football stadium in the world. The work still isn’t complete four years on, even though they were able to move back in after two years and play in front of a reduced capacity.

Barcelona plan to do similar, but the heavy lifting at the start of the project meant they had to depart. Expanding Barca’s 6,000-seater reserve team stadium with temporary stands was considered, but the best option was the Olympic Stadium since sharing the 41,000-seater home of neighbours Espanyol would not have gone down well with either fan base.

Espanyol played at the Olympic Stadium themselves between 1997 and 2009 when their old stadium was sold to pay off debts and was demolished. It was in one game at the Olympic Stadium that Lionel Messi made his league debut for Barcelona in a Catalan derby, but the venue was never popular with Espanyol fans, though their spell at the ground coincided with half of